Week Twenty: In Which I Meet Magnat’s Dog.
Older Ice fans may recall a line of car audio called Magnat for it hasn’t been on the UK market for some time. A German-designed line of product, it came from the same people who produced Audiovox AV kit and was distributed over here by an outfit called FSM, where the ‘˜F’ stood for boss Steve Fryer’s surname. Then the makers made a crap decision and stole it away from him.
It went to BBG, who were in the midst of concentrating on the TV brackets that would result in the company being bought by Peerless Industries and allowing their boss Gordon Dutch to buy an Aston Martin.you can’t blame a guy for losing focus on a market when that was cooking! The BBG Ice brands went off to Celsus when that happened.
But Magnat car audio got left behind. This was the brand that despite the cartoony bulldog logo (with baseball cap, two piercings and a spiked collar!) and the slogan, ‘Sound Mit Biss’ actually did make some deeply serious audio. The first distributor brought in a couple of Aggressor 6000 subs, fully 24 inches across, that were used in a ‘Wassafuck’s THAT!’ attraction mode in shop windows. Once, snapper Spike and I went to Germany to hear a van made with two of these, expecting a crazed bass wagon. What we got was beauty and the same unstoppable, limitless bass as a high end home woofer!
And now there’s a new agent in the UK for Magnat, except that he has the home kit rather than the car stuff and I have a 5.1ch set in my living room to review for Home Cinema Choice magazine. Odd innit how the world turns? Meanwhile, there is an increasingly large heap of reviews to get at, so I’ll concentrate on that this week, hence the nice early(ish) arrival of this little weekly blogoh and if you want a 24 inch woofer with HOOGE chassis, I know where to find one going cheap-yet-new.
Adam Rayner – Online Editor